White shirt moment

Hanna Riedmar [se]
PAS #18 | “somebody - everybody - nobody”
Fredrikstad, Norway 2010
30
You won’t take this thing out these words before I say ‘em / 4.45 minutes
I entered the room naked and walked slowly towards the audience...3 meter in front of
them I stopped and looked them in the eyes for some seconds. In one of my hands I hold
an i-pod player and in the other one, confetti. I wore big headphones and the cable from
this reached down to the floor. After standing still for a while I pressed the play button
and an Eminem song (”not afraid”) started to play loud in my ears. My task was to sing
the lyric together with the artist - to be with the lyric. I wanted to deliver the song to
the audience who couldn´t hear the music at all. I didn´t knew the song very well and
I couldn´t hear my own voice...so the result became really odd and strange. After singing
I threw confetti over my head and went out though a door behind the audience.
Background: We can never reach each other’s “everything”. I can never experience others
experience of me. You can never experience the experience of others. We can only
experience the image we make of each other, the roles we create and give each other.
I asked myself – how can I give the audience most of me? To give away as much as possible
of me was to give away the control - the control of the own image of myself. To give
them something they didn´t expect from me and something that I never had expected
from myself. I wanted to create an image of “everything of me and nothing” in the same
time, an awkward situation for me and my audience.